5 ms·
The idea is that you treat the earth's atmosphere as a resonant tank, pumped by the coil at the tower. The inverse square law doesn't apply here. The real prac
by voldacar 4y ago
The idea is that you treat the earth's atmosphere as a resonant tank, pumped by the coil at the tower. The inverse square law doesn't apply here.
The real practical problem is that if such a system were scaled up, any metal object anywhere on earth with sharp edges would become a fire hazard due to sparking. Long pieces of wire would become similarly hazardous and radio communications probably would be much noisier and more difficult. Also there are economic challenges as you can't really bill specific customers.
- mr_toad 4y agoWouldn’t the charge leak away, like any other capacitor? How much power would be needed to overcome natural losses?
- voldacar 4y agoI'm not really sure, this resonant phenomenon already exists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances) and is pumped by global lightning activity. However this is not very efficient as most of the energy of lightning strikes falls outside of the resonant band, which is around 7 hz. Maybe you could figure out the amount of electrical energy being spent by all global lightning strikes within a slice of time, then if you knew the spectrogram of the electromagnetic emissions from a lightning strike you could calculate the percentage of that energy that falls within the resonant band of the system (around 7hz plus the next few harmonics), which won't be much, then compare that number to the actual amount of ambient energy in the system to get a rough idea of how efficient it would be in an equilibrium state.